VMware's Cloud Foundry Celebrates First Anniversary

VMware announced new partnerships, tools and a method for submitting contributions as it celebrates the first anniversary of its Cloud Foundry platform as a service (PaaS) technology.

PALO ALTO, Calif.  Vmware celebrated the first birthday of Cloud Foundry, the companys open platform as a service (PaaS), with announcements of new partnerships, a new system for managing open-source software contributions, new tools for operating large-scale services and additional multi-cloud deployment choices.
At an event at the VMware headquarters here, company CTO and Senior Vice President of R&D Steve Herrod demonstrated how Cloud Foundry is becoming the open PaaS of choice for the cloud era, giving developers a choice of clouds for deployment, frameworks and application services while dramatically simplifying deployment and scaling of applications.

Since the launch of Cloud Foundry as the first open PaaS one year ago, weve seen incredible developer excitement for a better way to build and deploy cloud applications as well as tremendous industry investment in and around Cloud Foundry, Herrod said in a statement. By offering a simplified approach that embraces the diversity and speed of modern application development, Cloud Foundry removes complexity at almost every stage of the development process and enables developers to take advantage of innovation that is occurring across the industry.

VMware launched Cloud Foundry in April 2011, with source code available under the Apache license. Cloud Foundry is a cloud-era application platform built to simplify and speed the development, deployment and operation of applications.
At the event, VMware announced new and enhanced partnerships with Cloud9, Collabnet, ServiceMesh, SOASTA and eBays X.commerce. Cloud9s browser-based integrated development environment now supports deployment to any instance of Cloud Foundry. Collabnet is adding support for Cloud Foundry to its agile enterprise development tools. ServiceMesh has added policy-driven deployment of Cloud Foundry for enterprises to its Agility Platform. SOASTA offers a Cloud Foundry-based automated-testing solution for the cloud. X.commerce, eBays open, end-to-end commerce technology platform, is building upon Cloud Foundry.
Meanwhile, VMware also introduced CloudFoundry.org, a new source-code management system for Cloud Foundry. By converging Cloud Foundry source code to a single set of public code repositories on GitHub and integrating with Gerrit for code reviews and Jenkins for continuous integration, the new process simplifies community code contributions, improves code quality and offers greater visibility into code changes as they happen.
Regarding its presence in the community, VMware said Cloud Foundry has been an open-source project from the day it was first released. The project is widely forked and followed on GitHub, and has seen broad and substantive contributions from the developer community, including support for dozens of major development frameworks and application services, as well as deployment to diverse cloud infrastructure, bug fixes, documentation and other contributions.
However, to facilitate even broader community participation, VMware has introduced Cloud Foundry BOSH, an open-source tool chain for release engineering, deployment and lifecycle management of large-scale distributed services. Designed to enable the systematic and prescriptive evolution of services, BOSH facilitates the operation of production instances of Cloud Foundry. Proven in the course of operating CloudFoundry.com, BOSH is available under the Apache license from CloudFoundry.org and currently includes support for VMware vSphere as well as early support for Amazon Web Services. Source code is available.

Darryl K. Taft covers the development tools and developer-related issues beat from his office in Baltimore. He has more than 10 years of experience in the business and is always looking for the next scoop. Taft is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and was named 'one of the most active middleware reporters in the world' by The Middleware Co. He also has his own card in the 'Who's Who in Enterprise Java' deck.